For you I’d swim the Allegheny
all the way from Brady’s Bend
to the Point, for you I’d eat fifty
chopped ham sandwiches
and wash them down with ten jugs
of city water straight from the tap, for you,
only you, I’d mow all the grass
in Schenley Park with a push mower
and in fall rake up every last leaf
with a hair brush. For you
I’d ride up the Duquesne incline
and yell right off Mt. Washington,
I LOVE YOOOO!!!
Then I’d slide back down
on my backside and catch the echo
before it hit Station Square, for you
I would march up the middle
of Forbes Avenue naked in the rain
at rush hour and stop only
when I got to Shakespeare’s statue
seated seriously before the Carnegie.
There, for you, I’d climb up into
the bronze bard’s lap (still naked)
and write a fourteen hundred line
sonnet, just for you.
- Diane Kerr
Diane Kerr teaches at the University of Pittsburgh Writing Center. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kalliope, Poetry East, Pearl, Southern Indiana Review and Zone 3 among others. Her chapbook One was published by Parallel Press in 2007. A full-length collection, Butterfly, published by WordTech Communications, is forthcoming in March. She lives in Regent Square. Many writers featured in Chapter & Verse are guests of Prosody, produced by Jan Beatty and Ellen Wadey. Prosody airs every Saturday morning on 90.5 FM.
